The present invention relates to a support structure for container handling machines such as rinsers, filling and capping/seaming machines.
The invention is particularly referred to bottling plants wherein star wheel conveyors and rotating platforms or carousels have to be supported and linked in a structure. In a first prior art, the star wheels are supported on a pre-drilled solid/massive table in such a way that the positions of the star wheels and of the rotating platforms are fixed and predetermined.
The main advantage of said solid/massive table is its own great structural rigidity that assures a sturdy support to the star wheels, thus enabling the latter to rotate at high speed.
On the other hand, said solid/massive table has the important drawback of being custom-made and hence not adaptable to more than one layout of a bottling plant. In particular, since from the manufacturing and pre-drilling steps, it is necessary acknowledged whether the bottling plant envisages a clockwise or a counter-clockwise layout and then manufacturing and pre-drilling the table accordingly. Therefore, after the manufacturing and pre-drilling steps, the layout of the bottling plant is set and cannot be reversed without throwing away the table just created.
According to a second prior art disclosed in document WO 2006/087088, a tubular structure is known. This document shows in-feed and out-feed star wheels arranged to be driven on column-shaped support housings. Each support housing comprises lateral connection interfaces to which a joint end of a connecting bar is detachably attached, to the other joint end being detachably connected to a connection interface of a further support housing or to a machine chassis, such that the star wheel configuration, defining the container transport paths, may be modularly varied.
According to a third prior art disclosed in document WO 2006/087109, a pre-table system for container handling machines is known. In the pre-table, the support housing is fixed to a floor-standing support structure having a tube and/or profile section frame directly or indirectly detachably connected to each other at jointing points, such that the star wheel configurations may be varied. The support housings are arranged in a free-standing manner such that free areas are formed around the support housings.
The second and third prior art disclosed in documents WO 2006/087088 and WO 2006/087109 encompass the following important drawback. The column-shaped support housings (according to the second prior art) or the floor-standing support structure having a tube and/or profile section frame (according to the third prior art) define a whole support structure, or basement, having a very low stiffness. Hence, in order not to over-load the basement, the star wheels cannot rotate at high speed, namely above a limiting-speed.